I am sure many have been perpetuated by forum members What are the best ones you remember?

I'll start.

- The college orchestra collectively deciding that at some point midway through rehearsal, when the conductor gave a strong downbeat, he was going to get the first movement of Beethoven 5 instead of the third movement of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. He actually kept going for a few bars with a very strange expression on his face while his brain worked out why his ears weren't hearing what he thought he was conducting.

- During a rehearsal of a piece including wind machine (I can't remember which piece now), conductor was constantly complaining that the wind machine was too soft. The horn section decided to make wind machine noises louder and louder until he said "That's better". I was part of the horn section but didn't participate in this as I was too busy cracking up.

- conductor was always on about about lousy intonation, procured a bunch of tuning forks and proceeded to hand them out. He told us that "unless you have a god that sits on your shoulder and sings LAAAAAAAAA (A440), you'd better have one of these at every rehearsal". For the next post-concert party, we got a doll, dressed it in a bowtie and made it a toothpick baton and put a little circuit board in it that played concert A when a hidden button was pressed - we made him a god to sit on his shoulder and sing LA.

All of the above were perpetuated by the same orchestra on the same long-suffering conductor...

Edit: Hmm. If GMF is the wrong place for this, maybe it belongs in Cafe, please move it? Many thanks.

Corenfa, your poor conductor! I hope he was thick-skinned.

This was not my prank, but anyhow.... There was a string player who used to turn up consistently late to orchestral rehearsals, usually arriving after we'd tuned up and already started playing. One day on his arrival, the conductor - apparently not one to get cross at this lateness - asked our principal oboist for "An A for [name of said string player] please". Naughty oboist proceeded to give him a Bb.

My biggest music related prank was when I was at school... I was doing a performance on piano for my advanced higher exam, and due to the length of the pieces I had a page turner in with me, one of my very close friends at the time. Well we liked our music teacher, but he kind of did our heads in, so as I was performing, my page turner surreptitiously unscrewed one of the piano stool legs... Now obviously as I knew what was going on, I made sure I sat closer to the other side, and tried not to move very much... However our music teacher DID move a lot when accompanying, and sure enough during the next persons exam, he rocked backwards and the stool collapsed under him! Totally hilarious at the time, more impressive is that he kept accompanying whilst sitting on the floor until the end of that piece!!!!

Our conductor survived all of the above and went on to stay another seven years after I graduated

This one will only make sense if you know the Poulenc Sextet and the Batman theme - there is one bar in the latter that is also in the former. Predictably, we stopped playing Poulenc and went into Batman - well, just the pianist really.

Most good musical pranks involve playing something else other than what you're supposed to...

College choir rehearsing Mozart's Requiem.

Half the bass section decided to alter, with great clarity, the first word of the 'Rex Tremendae' .

I think rehearsal resumed after about 5 minutes.

Not really a prank, but I did once tell my music teacher at school that he had enough chins to play a string quartet all by himself.

I remember a wonderful church organist years and years ago who used to relate some tales to me - on one particular occasion he was accompanying a very arrogant and obnoxious tenor who complained in rehearsal that the song at pitch was too low, so CM transposed up a semitone, whereupon the tenor complained it was now too high, so it was duly transposed back down the semitone......the tenor then complained it was too low, so my friend, having got tired of this, transposed it up a 4th for the concert, and the high note at the end of the piece came out as a strangled squeak (accompanist's revenge....!)

*tries to imagine what would happen if her university orchestra tried this*

...............

*decides there are some things that are too scary to imagine*

There is quite a famous prank involving Stravinsky (though not actually aimed at him) when he gave the downbeat to the orchestra and out came "Happy Birthday". To quote the man himself:

"I gave the downbeat to begin a rehearsal of Tchaikovsky's Second Symphony in Aspen one day in the summer of 1950, when instead of the doleful opening chord, out came this ridiculously gay little tune. I was very surprised, of course, and quite failed to 'get it,' as Americans say -- the 'it' being that one of the orchestra players had just become a father. I confess that the shock of the substituted music and the change of emotions piqued me, and that for some time I considered myself the victim of a practical joke."

A couple from many years ago.

First one was on the Easter course of the county youth orchestra, and it was April 1st. We were rehearsing an overture that just started with a slow intro in the wind (a Mendelsohn one I think), and instead of playing it in C we played it in C# - the conductor didn't have perfect pitch and was surprised when the strings came in.
Probably you had to be there :-)

Second one was on a summer music course, rehearsing Verdi's Requiem with full orchestra and choir, under a very well-known choral conductor. Everything was being taken very seriously, but someone surreptitiously handed out bits of manuscript to everyone in the orchestra, and said "play this when we get to letter X". Then, at one of the grand climaxes of the piece, instead of glorious Verdi, we had "Entry of the Gladiators" ...

Chris

you've reminded me of this story that someone told me, that isn't a prank but a concert gone wrong. Robert Levin, an American pianist, is apparently known for improvising his cadenzas when he plays Mozart concerti. He also gets quite imaginative and sometimes they go on for a while. He was playing one with a conductor who did not have perfect pitch, and was modulating all over the place- and got into the flattened dominant key (for the purposes of this let's say A flat major and the concerto is in D). He played a 6-4 chord in D-flat, the conductor thought that was the 6-4 chord that heralded the end of the cadenza and brought the orchestra in.... in D, against an A-flat chord.

I wish I knew if this was true.

our music master got bored during those dire assemblies we used to have to endure, and decided to liven up the hymn a bit by cranking up the pitch for eadh new verse....and as the hymn had a lot of verses, the results were pretty predictable

Last summer we had a gig the night before the conductor's wedding I don't know who was more surprised when Huntingdon overture was replaced by 'I'm getting married in the morning' him or me for how long it took him to realise. The gig was a fundraiser for the church his wedding was going to be held at so they really appreciated it as well.

One of my friends turned up to her saxophone lesson on April Fools Day a couple of years ago with her friends violin! The teacher opened the door and stood there confused for a couple of seconds before working out it was a prank!

Brilliant topic, corenfa!

I laughed so much at this... I told it to some wind band colleagues and now we have a Plan Macabre cooked up for our conductor's birthday!

We look forward to hearing how it went here

In my time playing in pit bands (usually on the last night of a week long gig)

We have played

:"The teddy bears picnic" instead of the National Anthem

:"The Superman Theme", as the MD came on for the start of the 2nd half.

Whilst MDing a show...one of the Gershwin ones...one of the songs "Slap that Bass (in 4/4)" starts with a solo bass and she played "mission impossible" (in 5/4)....not a good moment for me.

Finally playing in My Fair Lady there is a solo trumpet bit before/after the race scene and we all held up mark cards out of 6.....very naughty.

This reminds me of igudesman and joo

One from my primary school days which seem so long even if I am just 17. We were Canine Spectacular (Dog related music medley) and one the tunes was 'How much is that doggy in the window'. In concert, the violinist played her solo, and the rest of the orchestra barked 'woof woof'. She cracked up laughing whilst continuing to play. Funny, though she was shaking and playing many wrong notes

The folk fiddles group at my school apparently once all tuned their instruments a semitone flat, so that when the pianist turned up, he would appear to be playing all the wrong notes. They didn't think about the fact that he has perfect pitch!

Not exactly a prank, but there was one folk session I went to a couple of times, where some of the whistles would all pull out a certain amount, so that they were in between keys and no one else could join in

I remember many years ago at school, singing in the Pirates of Penzance.

Everything was fine till the Dress Rehearsal, when, at the conductor's gesture, we all burst forth with "A Rollocking Band of Pirates We", the first two words being modified in the way that the Reverend Spooner would have called his own...

I have to say that our poor head of music looked rather white at that place in the first public performance to lots of doting parents! :-)

Mine was a variant of this. I was asked to step in to accompany a rehearsal of The Yeomen of the Guard. In case you don't know it, the quartet "Strange Adventure" has a short orchestral introduction, an entire verse sung unaccompanied, the same orchestral music used as an interlude, a second verse unaccompanied, and then a coda with accompaniment.

After the first verse, I played the interlude a semitone higher. They all looked aghast at one another - "have we REALLY gone that flat?" - not having perfect pitch, they of course sang the second verse in the key I had signalled to them, possibly even going sharp in their attempts not to flatten this time. You can imagine their faces when I brought in the piano at the end of the second verse back at the original pitch.

I love this!!

Can't wait to see what happens on 1st April- I'm on a music course, so it could be quite interesting, seeing as I could imagine most of the people on the course being involved in these sorts of pranks

This one involves the late Maurice Murphy, wonderful trumpeter. He was, at the time, lead trumpet in the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra, and I was singing in the choir in a broadcast concert. We'd been told ten seconds till we were live on air, so please be quiet, everybody. Silence fell, then the silence was broken by the plangent sound of the opening to Coronation Street on the trumpet. Furious production assistants waving at us all to be quiet!

Is that what made Stravinsky compose his own improved version?